Related papers: Dark matter as a heavy thermal hot relic
The evolution of the Universe between inflation and the onset of big bang nucleosynthesis is difficult to probe and largely unconstrained. This ignorance profoundly limits our understanding of dark matter: we cannot calculate its thermal…
If the temperature of the hot thermal plasma in the Early Universe was within a few orders of magnitude of the Planck scale $M_{\rm Pl}$, then the hoop conjecture predicts the formation of microscopic black holes from particle collisions in…
The Cold Dark Matter paradigm successfully explains many phenomena on scales larger than galaxies, but seems to predict galaxy halos which are more centrally concentrated and have a lumpier substructure than observed. Endowing cosmic dark…
Thermal freeze-out is a compelling framework for naturally generating the dark matter abundance. We systematically study a broad range of dark matter and mediator particle combinations that can viably realize thermal freeze-out, focusing on…
We propose a new mechanism for thermal dark matter freezeout, termed Co-Decaying Dark Matter. Multi-component dark sectors with degenerate particles and out-of-equilibrium decays can co-decay to obtain the observed relic density. The dark…
We propose a model where a long-lived pseudoscalar EeV particle can be produced with sufficient abundance so as to account for the cold dark matter density, despite having a Planck mass suppressed coupling to the thermal bath. Connecting…
In some scenarios for the early universe, non-relativistic thermal dark matter chemically decouples from the thermal environment once the temperature drops well below the dark matter mass. The value at which the energy density freezes out…
If the interaction rates between the visible and the dark sectors were never strong enough, the observed dark matter relic abundance could have been produced in the early Universe by non-thermal processes. This is what occurs in the…
We investigate the thermal relic density of the cold dark matter in the context of the brane world cosmology. Since the expansion law in a high energy regime is modified from the one in the standard cosmology, if the dark matter decouples…
Thermal dark matter is a compelling setup that has been probed by a multitude of experiments, mostly in the GeV-TeV mass range. The thermal paradigm in the sub-GeV range is about to experience the same experimental test with the next…
The relic abundance of thermal dark matter particles is generally assumed to be inversely proportional to their annihilation rate, which is therefore constrained by the present matter density, <sigma v> ~ 10^{-26} Omega_{dm}^{-1} cm^3…
In this paper, we calculate the relic abundance of the dark matter particles when they can annihilate into sterile neutrinos with the mass $\lesssim 100 \text{ GeV}$ in a simple model. Unlike the usual standard calculations, the sterile…
The lack of new physics at the LHC so far weakens the argument for TeV scale thermal dark matter. On the other hand, heavier, non-thermal dark matter is generally difficult to test experimentally. Here we consider the interesting and…
Dark matter candidates arise naturally in many models that address the hierarchy problem. In the fraternal twin Higgs model which could explain the absence of the new physics signals at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), there are several…
As the LHC continues to search for new weakly interacting particles, it is important to remember that the search is strongly motivated by the existence of dark matter. In view of a possible positive signal, it is essential to ask whether…
Calculating the abundance of thermally produced dark matter particles has become a standard procedure, with sophisticated methods guaranteeing a precision that matches the percent-level accuracy in the observational determination of the…
Kinetic decoupling of dark matter typically happens much later than chemical freeze-out. In fact, local thermal equilibrium is an important assumption for the usual relic density calculations based on solving the Boltzmann equation (for its…
The thermal freeze-out mechanism for relic dark matter heavier than $O(10-100 $ TeV$)$ requires cross-sections that violate perturbative unitarity. Yet the existence of dark matter heavier than these scales is certainly plausible from a…
We explore a class of dark matter models with two dark matter candidates, only one interacts with the standard model sector. One of the dark matter is thermalized with the assistance of the other stable particle. While both stable particles…
Predictivity of many non-thermal dark matter (DM) models is marred by the gravitational production background. This problem is ameliorated in models with lower reheating temperature $T_R$, which allows for dilution of gravitationally…